The worst weeks of the pandemic crisis have now begun: the period before the vaccinations start to take effect, as it takes 3-5 weeks to create immune response protection in those who are vaccinated; and the aftermath of the holiday season at New Year, in which the highly transmissible Delta strain started making its devastating impact felt.
Pandemics are relatively easy to understand, if you are good with numbers. The more densely populated an area is, the more closely people live in communal households and inter- generational living arrangements, the more people physically go in to a workplace rather than work from home, the more quickly the illness will spread.
The safest way to operate if you can is to avoid people. A person to person transmission event cannot take place if one of the persons is not present.
This also applies to group activities such as holiday getaways of the kind that people locked in their city homes and apartments understandably yearn for. The pandemic has thrived in conditions of communal congeniality - religious functions, festivals to mark auspicious occasions, weddings, funerals, parties, pot luck dinners with shared food platters, and feasts of all kinds, particularly those held in air-conditioned rooms.
It is understandable that many people cannot change their homes and living arrangements, and can only do their best via partitions and increased social distancing to diminish transmission to those they live with. But what I will never understand is the mania shown by some people to continue to organize group outings to the cool, misty hill country in the midst of the worst pandemic in a century.
Boutique hotels offering group discounts and ‘two for the price of one’ deals can be seen advertising their high end and high priced rooms on Instagram, with an array of glorious views of green hills and glistening swimming pools and sumptuous dining platters, accompanied by swim suited or bath robed European models in alluring poses offering many kinds of prompts and provocations to viewers to do what they are doing, and have what they are having.
These hotels have not been legally permitted to operate during lockdowns, and intermittent inter-provincial travel restrictions have made it difficult for them to attract guests, since last March. They have maintenance and repairs to fund, and staff salaries to pay, and their economic loss must have been significant.
It’s a volatile situation, as the tourism industry needs to open up, but in a well managed way that minimizes risk to the citizens of the country who have not yet been double vaccinated. This is where vaccine politics comes into play: there may come a time soon, when overseas visitors who can prove they have been double vaccinated, and who test negative for Covid on arrival in Sri Lanka, can readily access express 24 hour quarantine processing, and are permitted to freely go anywhere in the island, while the local population are forced to stay restricted in their homes.
This is privilege in action, as global access to vaccines has not been equitable, anywhere in the world.
The so-called local elite, whose sense of being special, blessed and set apart in comparison to the ordinary citizens of this country has been fed by every affirming experience and monetized event in their lives, will not stay locked down long. Those who have acquired the vaccines accepted by the U.K., the U.S., Europe and Australia will seek to gather their cliques together and go and take poses and filtered selfies in every infinity pool in sight, and justify it to themselves as a well-earned break.
The exhausting task of keeping the kids (the generation in whose hands our future will be placed!) entertained, with online school, and so regrettably few inner resources, will be remedied with cocktails and mocktails and sunrise all-you-can-eat breakfasts by the pool, and evening sunset pre-BBQ bites and delectable snacks, while the dedicated chefs in their pristine, perfect, puffy white hats labour to fulfill these insatiable appetites. Yum Yum.
I observed with incredulity one of these getaway weekends being arranged via WhatsApp last week. Person after person spoke on the chat about how much they missed meeting up, how they couldn’t breathe in the pollution and dust of the City, and how heavenly it would be to just escape this ongoing nightmare for just a few days.
People like this don’t think about the impact they have, unless it’s the impact of a new trend in clothing, accessories or winged eyeliner that they have acquired to impress each other. All is vanity.
The numbers of deaths in the hill country have so far been consistently far fewer statistically than those in the densely populated Western Province. This is despite the large and economically vulnerable community of plantation workers and their families living in crowded conditions in housing built decades ago, and not modernized and upgraded, who have no other home but this region.
If monied tourists and self indulgent, privileged elites come swarming upcountry like birds of paradise or super models at a location shoot, treating the region as a backdrop for their Instagram Story and reels, complete with beauty spots and quaint locals, these upcountry communities will be sharply, adversely and disproportionally affected.
The ordinary citizens have no safety net, they have no ability to work from home, they have no insurance cover, they have no financial or health protection. Those working in the plantation sector are still fighting for a wage of 1000 LKR a day, the price of a creaming soda ordered on room service at one of these luxury boutique hotels.
Can the gratification of the rich be delayed just 6 to 8 weeks? Can they put a limit on their excesses for even that space of time? We cannot appeal to their conscience or sense of what is morally right, because they have long lost the habit of considering the needs of anyone other than themselves.
‘Life in the fast lane, slowly makes you lose your mind’, as the Eagles sang. And the fast lane looks like it is about to become super crowded with super rich people trying to compensate themselves for lost time.
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